Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

The Booker-nominated writer's debut The Spinning Heart is the
literary read of the year

Kidnap,
betrayal, violence, affairs and heartbreak – in Donal Ryan’s début The
Spinning Heart tensions are simmering very close to the surface. Taking
home Book of the Year at last year’s Irish Book Awards, and recently
longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, Donal
Ryan's The Spinning Heart is setting the literary world alight. The
novel is set in the wake of the financial crash in rural Ireland. Ryan says
that although he did not deliberately set out to write a novel about the
recession, “if you set any work of fiction in contemporary Ireland [the
economic crash] is going to be a huge factor, it’s unavoidable really.
Because it is just everywhere, it permeates every level of society; everyone
in Ireland has been affected in some way.”

The need to tell stories,
to create narratives, grows from the weird essence of the human
condition: we are conscious, and inextricable from consciousness is
the awareness that we are going to die. This knowledge makes simply
living kind of a crazy act. Plus, life is chaotic, and most of what
happens during our short time alive just happens to us. Most of what
happens occurs by chance or through the will of some outside entity;
occasionally we are able to exert power, but usually with compromise
and adjustment. So we narrate our lives as we live them, making sense
of the chaos by organizing our experiences. Forming our lives into
plot, we can pick out certain patterns and see some cause and effect.
We learn to navigate the chaos, sometimes, little by little. We
believe we are moving forward.

There are seven billion of
us walking around with our stories unfolding inside our heads. We
have an unspoken -- generally unconscious -- understanding of this
fact. We tend to cluster within cultures where our narratives take
similar forms. There is, though, still the problem of language. Much
of the frustration of being human arises from the different
experiences we have of words and their meanings, even when we speak
the same tongue.

A crabby and often cryptic writing coach
occasionally stations himself in the back corner of my study.
Inexplicably, he is a Greek -- an old Greek, as in, hoary of mane and
leathern of skin, as well as an ancient Greek, as in, toga-clad and
Socratic in aspect. In fact, he may be none other than Diogenes
himself, but I can't be sure, as he never talks about himself and,
unlike the original, this fellow writes nothing that later gets
carved in stelae -- though, come to think of it, he does talk with
the irritated terseness of one obliged to chisel his own words in
stone.

Over the years, whenever he has intruded upon me, I have, unbeknownst
to him, switched over to a separate file on my computer and
transcribed his remarks. They are numbered, these comments of his,
because this is how he alerts me that he's standing back there
between the lamp and the bookshelf: He just declares a number.
Interestingly, the numbers have not all arisen in order. Rather, he
seems to be citing a pre-existing list, the arrangement of which is
pedagogically reasonable but not exactly equivalent to the order in
which I personally have needed his oracular utterances. Somehow, from
the way he declares the numbers, I can tell they're Roman numerals;
if I knew Ionian numerals, he'd use those, but I don't, so he settles
for the next best thing.

An Impossible Number of Books: Matthew L. Jockers's "Macroanalysis"

August 16th, 2013 - Los Angeles Review of Books

IF YOU TOOK an English survey course when you were an undergraduate, you probably learned about the progression of literary eras. Romanticism was followed by Victorian realism, which was followed by naturalism, modernism, postmodernism, and so on. It’s a good story, this vision of literary history, one that supplies structure to an otherwise baffling amalgam of styles, themes, and idiosyncrasies developed over centuries and distributed around the globe. It might even be true. But if you were an attentive student, you probably had qualms about it. Some of your reservations may have concerned the works you’d actually read. Were Proust and Stein really doing that same, modernist thing? Doesn’t Dickens, in the right light, look an awful lot like Wordsworth? Other doubts, though, would have turned on what was absent from the syllabus.The usual way in which to pose questions of the second sort — those about the books literary critics don’t read, rather than those they do — involves the biases of the canon. Why so many dead white men? Why not more books from the Global South? Why not more women and working-class writers? Why not more genre fiction and radical literature and everything that isn’t (or wasn’t) always shelved with capital-L Literature? Indeed, these were the pressing questions of a previous generation of literary scholarship. When it turned out that the answers on offer weren’t very good (Greatness! Importance! Tradition!), the canon changed in meaningful, if not radical, ways. Less Scott, Trollope, and Bellow, more Behn, Morrison, and Cisneros.But changing the canon — or even a proliferation of canons, as literary studies has fractured into a collection of increasingly well-defined subfields — takes us only so far. Readers are finite creatures, capable of making their way through only a tiny fraction of the millions of books published over the centuries. The problem, at this sort of scale, has less to do with canonical selection bias than it does with our inevitable ignorance of nearly everything that has ever been written. It’s one thing to claim that a particular book was influential in its day (though influence is a tricky matter, more sociological and economic than literary) or that a text has been treated as important in subsequent scholarship. It’s something else entirely to argue that the same book is “representative” of a genre’s or an era’s output, especially when even the best-informed critics have read almost none of the material in question.So how can we know the outlines of literary history without reading an impossible number of books? One answer is that we can’t. At best we tell stories, some of which are more convincing than others for their intended audiences, but all of which are based on vanishingly small slivers of evidence. Alternatively, we abandon the project entirely, preferring instead to make small but more easily defensible claims about individual texts. A third option, though, would be to change the way we work, to preserve large-scale claims by ending the singular identification of literary study with close reading.If the idea of studying literature without reading it strikes you as somewhere between bizarre and dangerous, you’re not alone. There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to dismissing such projects as hopeless (or trivial, or both) or denouncing them as the death of the humanities. But it’s worth asking what they entail and what they allow before we resign ourselves to living with the tremendous limitations of reading alone.More

Edouard Lambelet's well-known German bookshop is located close to Tahrir Square in Cairo. The bookseller has lived through many conflicts in Egypt, but for the first time, he's now considering throwing in the towel.

Porn legend Sasha Grey sat down for margaritas with Marlow Stern to discuss her debut erotic novel, ‘The Juliette Society,’ her own sexual history—including her first time and a recurring BDSM fantasy. (Warning: NSFW.)

Sasha Grey is glowing. And not that after-sex glow, but the radiance of contentment. The 25-year-old porn provocateur turned film and TV actress is fresh from a photo shoot, and proceeds to de-glam herself, peeling off a pair of faux eyelashes and scrubbing off her mascara with a paper napkin. We’re at a West Hollywood Mexican joint called El Coyote, which looks like the type of place you’d find in a Tarantino flick. She picked this spot for our interview—our fourth, I think—because she digs the pork tacos, but we both have dinner plans after, so instead just opt for margaritas.

Actress Sasha Grey. (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty)

After starring in a bevy of porn films between the ages of 18 and 21—a career which A.O. Scott, film critic of The New York Times, described as “distinguished both by the extremity of what she is willing to do and an unusual degree of intellectual seriousness doing it,” she retired from porn, and segued into film and TV roles, including the lead role in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and a long guest arc on HBO’s Entourage. Her latest endeavor is an erotic novel called The Juliette Society, about a young, sexually unfulfilled woman named Catherine who spends her days indulging in sexual fantasies. Her thirst is finally quenched when she gains entrée into a secret society where the rich and powerful bump uglies.

Grey wrote the novel—her first—in just 10 months, and envisions it as the first in a series (she’s at work on the second installment now).

There’s a great line early on in The Juliette Society that says 120 Days of Sodom is the only book that outdoes the Bible for sexual perversion and violence.

[Laughs] It’s funny because I’ve spoken with you a few times, and I wondered if you were going to ask about that. Yes, it is a viewpoint I share. I guess some of that comes from the fact that I’m a reformed Catholic—as in I’m no longer a Catholic, but was raised one.

30.08.13 | Joshua Farrington - The Bookseller

Two titles from Penguin have been shortlisted for this year's Warwick Prize: science history Pathfinders by Jim Al-Khalili and The Old Ways by nature writer Robert Macfarlane. The prize, open to fiction, non-fiction and poetry written in English by a writer of any nationality, is run every two years by the University of Warwick. Also in the running for this year's award are Sufficient Grace by Amy Elspeth (Scribe), a novel about a religious community in rural Wisconsin; Delusions of Gender, a study by cognitive neuroscientist Cordelia Fine (Icon Books); short story collection Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Israeli writer Etgar Keret (Chatto); and Memorial by Alice Oswald (Faber), a collection of poems inspired by Homer's Iliad. The chair of judges is Professor Ian Sansom of Warwick's Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, who is joined by professor Marina Warner and professor Ed Byrne of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Sansom said: "We believe the shortlist exemplifies the inclusive approach to the appreciation of literature that the Warwick Prize for Writing was established to promote." Naomi Klein won the inaugural prize in 2009 for The Shock Doctrine (Penguin), while Peter Forbes won in 2011 for Dazzled and Deceived (Yale University Press). The winner will be announced at a ceremony held at the Wallace Collection in London on 24th September.

Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney died at a hospital
in Dublin after a short illness. He was 74. The eldest of nine children, Heaney
was born on a farm in Northern Ireland and went on to become the most
celebrated poet since W. B. Yeats, penning 13 poetry collections and two plays,
as well as books on the writing process.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1995 and
later the prestigious Forward poetry prize, among other awards. Tributes quickly
began pouring in through news and social-media sites, many quoting a line from
"Digging," the much-loved first poem of his first collection, Death
of a Naturalist: “Between my finger and my thumb, The squat pen rests; snug
as a gun.”

30.08.13 | Joshua Farrington - The Bookseller

New Penguin Random House c.e.o. Markus Dohle has spoken of the "societal impact" made by the books the company publishes, telling his staff they are "united by a greater purpose", as Bertelsmann announced its first-half results for 2013. Ahead of the merger with Penguin on 1st July, Random House notched up a mid-year record profit for the first half of 2013, boosted by Dan Brown's Inferno selling more than 4m copies in all formats across English–language territories. Overall revenues were €915m (£781m), down 3% from €947m (£808m) last year, when figures were enhanced by EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. However operating earnings before interest and tax stood at €117m (£100m) for the first six months of 2013, up 4% from €113 (£96m) in the first half of 2012. Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, and R J Palacio's Wonder were also highlights, alongside the Random House English, German and Spanish-language versions of the E L James trilogy, which saw over five million print audio and e-books sold in the half-year. In the UK, the Random House Group "notably increased" its share of titles on the Sunday Times bestseller lists, Bertelsmann noted, while Germany's Verlagsgruppe Random House was said to have had an "outstanding" first half-year, with strong growth in e-books and digital now accounting for over 10% of its revenues. In a letter to staff announcing the half-year results, Dohle commented: "Since July 1st, I have had the privilege to meet with more than 8,000 of our colleagues around the world, getting to know the heart of our new company: you. Each of our Penguin Random House companies faces distinct opportunities and challenges, but the way all of you approach your work is the same: with a commitment fuelled by a genuine love for what you do. In my conversations at every location—from Kirkwood to Frating, Toronto to New Delhi—the depth of dedication you have shown for our books and for our company has been truly inspiring. We are united by a greater purpose: the societal impact we as a team make every day by putting the very best books in the hands of readers around the world." Dohle said the new company was "building upon our excellent performances pre-merger", telling staff: "Our financial achievements are a reflection of the excellence you bring to what you love doing as members of our publishing family. Whether by publishing award-winning authors and the books that people just can't stop talking about, or through innovating in digital and enhancing print capabilities, we are implementing our vision to shape and redefine the reading experience." He picked out successes from across Penguin Random House in its first weeks as a united company, including Reza Aslan's Zealot in the US, "sales breakthroughs" for John Williams' Stoner and Terry Hayes' I Am Pilgrim in the UK, and Sylvia Day's Entwined with You topping The Bookseller's first e-book ranking, as well as prize wins for George Megalogenis and John van de Ruit in Australia and South Africa, and the publication of the first enhanced e-book from Random House India.More

Trying to write something to mark the passing of Seamus Heaney at the age of 74 is a task few would want to take up, as he was Ireland’s greatest living poet, which would by default make him one of the finest poets the English language has known since the publication of his 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist. News of the beloved 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature winner’s death spread across the internet quickly this morning, with obituaries to 140-character tributes and lines of his work tweeted by those who admired him.

Profits
Rise at RH Despite Sales Decline
After Penguin Group reported a strong first half of 2013 in its last financial
report before the merger with Random House became official, RH parent company
Bertelsmann reported this morning that profits at RH rose to 117 million euros
from 113 million euros in the first half of 2012 despite a 3.4% sales decline
to 915 million euros. The decline in sales was expected, given the strong
performance of the Fifty Shades trilogy that began in RH’s North American
markets last April. more »

Sales,
Profits Up at Lagardere Publishing
Total sales at Lagardere Publishing rose 1.4% in the first half of 2013, to 917
million euros, while EBIT increased 24.6% to 71 million euros. The company
attributed the gains to strong trade sales in France, the U.K., and the U.S.
Sales in Lagardere’s U.S. subsidiary, Hachette Book Group, rose 7% driven by
higher sales of Nicholas Sparks’ titles plus higher e-book sales. E-books
accounted for 34% of adult trade sales in the U.S. in the first six months of
2013. more »

Every single writer can't be Charles Dickens, James Joyce or
Jane Austen.

Most authors only end up with one hit book, and the rest are duds, or just
don't get the same pick up (or they only wrote one book to begin with, a la
Harper Lee with "To Kill a Mockingbird"). Continue reading...

Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and was praised by Robert Lowell as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats," died earlier today, the Telegraph reported. He was 74.

"I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself," Heaney told NPR in 2008. "Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."via Shelf Awareness

The Luminaries was
launched earlier in the month to much fanfare with the announcement that it had
been long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. At the launch in Wellington at
Unity Books, people queued for an hour to get a signed copy. Ellie is now in
the UK launching the northern hemisphere edition, getting a sore signing hand,
and we hear, enjoying a bit of haggis. Before she departed the Book Council
held an event with Ellie, chaired by David Larsen, hosted by the wonderful
Takapuna Library and including live piano music as guests arrived. The Luminaries is now available
as an ebook here.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Poetry and Other Animals: Amy Brown, Therese Lloyd, and Ashleigh Young

Three poets, representing the imaginative range and unique voice of a new generation in New Zealand poetry, join us to share a sampler of their recent work and discuss how their poems came to be. Last year saw the release of Therese Lloyd's Other Animals and Ashleigh Young's Magnificent Moon, two stunning debuts. Amy Brown's second poetry collection, The Odour of Sanctity, reinvents a neglected form - the epic. They reflect on three ways into New Zealand poetry with Harry Ricketts.

DATE: Monday 2 September

TIME: 12.15-1.15pm

VENUE: The Marae, Level 4, Te Papa(please note that no food may be taken onto the Te Papa Marae)

The Writers on Mondays series is presented by the International Institute of Modern Letters and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Aug 28, 2013 - PW

In late July a number of regional booksellers associations as well as the American Booksellers Association wrote to the White House to express their concerns about his nationally televised appearance at an Amazon fulfillment center in Chattanooga, Tenn as part of his tour promoting his economic recovery agenda. There was no immediate White House response to the issues that booksellers raised about Amazon’s predatory pricing, its decision to fight state sales tax, and other tactics that booksellers view as hurting all small businesses.

In a wordy, form letter, with no mention of Amazon, President Obama replied to Steve Fischer, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, last weekend. He, or more likely a staffer, used the letter to highlight Obama's commitment to job creation and particularly to helping small businesses, hit hard by the economic recession, grow. In closing, he noted, “I will continue to do everything in my power to ensure America remains the best place on Earth to turn a great idea into a successful business.”

Latest shortlists announced

Thursday August 29th: Today the Crime Writers’ Association announced the shortlists for the remaining three CWA 2013 Daggers. The eventual winners will be revealed on 24th October, at the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards 2013.The shortlisted authors are:

For the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger:Belinda Bauer for Rubbernecker (Bantam/Transworld)Lauren Beukes for The Shining Girls (HarperCollins)Mick Herron for Dead Lions (Soho Crime)Becky Masterman for Rage Against the Dying (Orion)

For the CWA John Creasey Dagger:Hanna Jameson for Something You Are (Head of Zeus)Malcolm Mackay for The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (Mantle)Derek B Miller for Norwegian by Night (Faber and Faber)Thomas Mogford for Shadow of the Rock (Bloomsbury)

For years, I felt guilty about my addiction – then I found some famous kindred spirits. Which is your favourite Reacher thriller?

When publishers send out copies of new releases to the newspapers, they customarily place an embargo which states that no review should appear before the stated publication date. This injunction is frequently ignored, as literary editors scramble to get their stuff up early. I am often unable to buy recently reviewed books because publication date is still weeks away. In general, I don't mind. I have plenty of reading to be getting on with.

But there are limits to my patience, and Lee Child is one of them. I recently read a review of a new Jack Reacher title (Never Go Back), and immediately tried to download it on the old Kindle, only to be told that it was not yet available. For two weeks! I wait a whole year for a new one to come out, and when it does I want it right away, as in, I am going to read this today, all day, all of it. I will not put it down, because I cannot. (I was introduced to Reacher by a New Zealand friend who was once on a plane with 10 pages still to go, and carried on reading until he was gently removed from his seat by a bemused flight attendant. He hadn't noticed that the plane had landed and that everyone had left.)

I am, in general, unembarrassed by the lowness of many of my tastes. Bugs Bunny is one of my role models, and I support Coventry City Football Club. But even so, I was for some time unwilling to share – at least with serious literary friends – the depth of my devotion to Lee Child's novels. It is one thing to like crime fiction and thrillers – to admire Ian Rankin, John le Carré, James Lee Burke, proper writers all of them – but no one, I imagine, values Child for the quality of his prose. One can hardly find, in the entire corpus of the work, a single sentence worthy of independent admiration. But put them together, one by one and page by page, and I am consumed, not by admiration exactly, but by something much more powerful – the great animating impulse of the whole story-telling business – the desire, the rage, to know what is going to happenMore

The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are
to return to the small screen, in a new Channel 5 series made using
computer-generated animation.

Based on the adventures of the loveable London litter-pickers, the 52,
11-minute shorts will air on the channel's pre-school segment Milkshake in
2015."The time is right for it to gain a whole new following," said Jessica
Symons, Channel 5's head of children's.Narrated by Bernard Cribbins, the original series first aired in 1973.Uncle Bulgaria, Orinoco and the rest of Elisabeth Beresford's characters were
revived on ITV in 1998.

"There are audiences of new children and international audiences who missed
The Wombles the first time around," said Mike Batt, who gave the characters
chart success in the 1970s.More

A free copy of Jamie Oliver's latest cookbook, Save With Jamie, is being donated to every library in the UK. The book, published today (29th August) by Penguin division Michael Joseph, focuses on cooking on a budget. More than 4,000 libraries in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will each receive a copy of the title, donated by Penguin Random House with the assistance of The Reading Agency. Oliver said: "We know from the fabulous work that libraries do every day that everyone deserves a chance to learn basic skills that can improve everyday lives. Reading and cooking are two of those skills for sure. I’ll admit I’ve been a late developer with the first, but I can definitely help with the second."Miranda McKearney, outgoing director of The Reading Agency, said: "We can’t thank Jamie and Penguin Random House enough for this incredibly generous gift to library users. It sends out a powerful message—to live well we need to feed our bodies with healthy food, and our minds with great reading. "For those under financial pressure, libraries offer fantastic free reading experiences and they’re a great place to go if you’re on a tight budget. We’re delighted to be working with the Society of Chief Librarians, Libraries Northern Ireland and the Scottish Library and Information Council to get Save with Jamie to every library in the country." Penguin Random House c.e.o. Tom Weldon said: "Save with Jamie is a book we are very proud to be publishing and we hope that this gift will genuinely have a positive impact on households of the UK." Tony Durcan of the Society of Chief Librarians said libraries were experiencing "a tsunami of demand from users on tight budgets . . . So Jamie’s gift is extremely welcome, and we will put the books to very good use." He added: "It’s really cheering to have this help in meeting the needs of the communities we are passionate about serving." Oliver has aroused considerable controversy in recent days with comments made while publicising the book and Channel 4 TV programme, "Jamie's Money Saving Meals". In an interview with the Radio Times, Oliver said low income families often made poor food choices, while in a Good Housekeeping interview he said his restaurants would close without immigrant workers, because British people would "whinge" about long hours and tough conditions. Newspaper columnists have piled into the debate, with views ranging from "Jamie is right; a poor diet is the national disease" to "Jamie Oliver has no right to tell us how to spend our money", coming from Oliver's Michael Joseph stablemate Jack Monroe, writing in the Independent.